Mark Ronson plays with littleBits at TED2014, along with the creator of these electronic building blocks, Ayah Bdeir. LittleBits have taken off in the past year — the company just announced $44.2 million in new funding, and two speakers at TEDWomen 2015 used them in their electronic experimentation. Photo: Ryan Lash/TED

Four years ago, TED Senior Fellow Ayah Bdeir founded littleBits “so everyone could unleash their inner inventor — without having to be an engineer.” Since then, many people have used littleBits’ electronic building blocks to do just that — and two of them happened to speak at TEDWomen 2015.

Want to find out how inventor Christina Mercando used littleBits to prototype a ring that connects to the Internet? Or how guitarist Kaki King created her latest show using a littleBits synth kit? Read on …

The sound (and sight) of music

Guitarist Kaki King’s multimedia show, “The Neck Is a Bridge to the Body,” uses projection mapping to turn a guitar into a living, breathing entity onstage. Standing upright as if on its own, her customized, white Ovation guitar “takes on an almost humanistic quality,” said King. “It looks otherworldly, so full of character.”

The direction for this show, which King performed an excerpt from at TEDWomen 2015, took shape underneath a tree in Brooklyn. A team of video and sound engineers from Glowing Pictures needed King to map out the music for the show so they could start creating the visual effects. King had to write a “brief” of her musical vision — a dramatic departure from her usual, more intuitive process of writing music.

“The guitar always has a say in what it wants me to do – it leads me to the next chord … Songs write themselves,” said King. “This time, I had to take a big notebook to the park, sit under a tree and really think about what I was trying to create.”

Working this way gnawed at her. And yet, she really wanted to try projection mapping. She struggled with how to make the guitar, rather than a computer, the star of the show.

One afternoon, King walked into a guitar store. “They had a littleBits Synth Kit out and I just started playing around with it,” she said. “I thought, ‘Wow, this is so cool.’” With the kit, she could produce a synthesizer’s sound effects directly from her guitar.

Kaki King’s new show features project mapping — and aims to make her guitar into a living entity. Here’s how she uses littleBits in the show. Photo: Marla Aufmuth/TED

After “a lot of experimentation,” King ended up attaching the synth kit modules to her Ovation, effectively creating a new instrument. “I wanted to make every sound come out of my guitar,” she said. “But the back of my guitar is round, so I couldn’t attach the modules in a linear way. We had extension wires going everywhere.”

With the help of clever lighting, the wires remained invisible to the audience. All they see – and hear – in the show are the vibrations of the guitar, reflected in large, on-screen visuals that move in tandem with King’s plucks and strums.

The performance crescendos during the song “Battle Is a Learning.” (Watch above.) “At that point, it’s gotten to this crazy pinnacle and visually it’s quite overwhelming,” said King. “You’re kind of going, ‘What else can happen?’ And then, it escalates.”

As King plays sludgy notes, psychedelic stripes light up the screen and guitar. They fracture into jagged shapes and static as she plays. Finally, King turns away from the strings entirely, and begins to manipulate the back of the guitar. As she creates piercing sounds, her body goes dark — the guitar appearing as if it’s playing itself. The stage fades into darkness with the final note.

How can she top that? King is now experimenting with embedding LED lights into her guitar.

The tech that puts a ring on it

Ringly is a piece of jewelry that’s like a “personal assistant.” The prototype for it was created out of littleBits. Photo: Courtesy of Christina Mercando

Christina Mercando has created a smart ring — Ringly, a piece of jewelry that connects to your phone. “It’s meant to be a little personal assistant, letting you know when you have certain notifications,” she said.

At TEDWomen 2015, Mercando demonstrated how Ringly shares information with its wearer: by subtly lighting up when, say, a spouse calls or vibrating in a specific pattern when, for example, a meeting is coming up in five minutes. “We don’t always have to stare at a screen,” she said. “Technology can hide in the objects we interact with every day.”

Mercando wanted to create a ring because it’s “much more personal” than other wearables. And because “I knew that if we could get the technology small enough to fit into a ring, we could put it into a lot of other form factors too,” she said. But this of course presented a challenge. While it is only slightly smaller than a postage stamp, Ringly actually includes 50 components of miniature tech.

To prototype the design — and figure out how people might feel about wearing a vibrating ring — Mercando turned to littleBits. “I knew how to do the software and design piece, but the electronics were new to me,” she said.

Mercando used a littleBits kit that included a motor, lights and a dimmer — “to control the intensity of the vibrations” — and paired it with gemstones and 3D-printed jewelry. The prototype (take a look above) simulated the sensation of having a ring vibrate. And while it was much larger than the final product, the prototype appealed to the test group.

“They thought it was so cool,” said Mercando. “When you feel it on your finger, it’s ‘wow.’ It actually feels good and is not as intense or as weird as we thought it might be.”

The prototype ended up influencing Ringly’s final design. Mercando tested out different gemstones with littleBits lights. “Originally, I wanted the gemstones to glow. But I realized that we were limited by the type of gemstone,” she said. With the added light, the colors changed even with different stones. “That’s why I made the decision to make a more subtle light at the side of the ring.”

Overall, the littleBits prototype helped Mercando share her vision – and not just with investors. Armed with her prototype, Mercando found herself in a waiting room at an investor’s office about to pitch Ringly. Coincidentally, she was sitting next to littleBits creator Ayah Bdeir.

Bdeir remembers this moment well. “We got to chatting and Christina told me that she makes connected jewelry. She asked if I’d like to see a prototype and I said, ‘Oh sure.’ She took out the prototype — and it was made with littleBits,” said Bdeir. “I was like, ‘Oh my god, I created that product!”

“It was a really nice coincidence,” said Bdeir.

]]>http://blog.ted.com/how-littlebits-fueled-electronic-experimentation-at-tedwomen/feed/0Mark Ronson plays with littleBitskatetedMark Ronson takes a moment to play with littleBits at TED2014, along with the electonric building blocks' creator, Ayah Bdeir. LittleBits have taken off in the past year — the company just announced $44.2 million in new funding and two speakers at TEDWomen 2015 used them in their electronic experimentation. Photo: Ryan Lash/TEDKaki King's new show features project mapping — and aims to make her guitar into a living entity. Here's how she uses littleBits in the show. Photo: Marla Aufmuth/TEDThe prototype for Ringly, created out of littleBits. Photo: Courtesy of Christina MercandoChristina Mercando shows Ringly, the final product, at TEDWomen 2015. Photo: Marla Aufmuth/TEDAyah-Bdeir-TED-Talk-imageRemembering James Hornerhttp://blog.ted.com/remembering-james-horner/
http://blog.ted.com/remembering-james-horner/#commentsTue, 23 Jun 2015 18:58:24 +0000http://blog.ted.com/?p=99506[…]]]>

At TED2005, James Horner shared the secret of what made him such a powerhouse film composer — he made it a point to watch each film as a viewer rather than as a creator.

“Very often directors will say, ‘That’s not what I had in mind. I shot it with this in mind.’ But when a bystander who’s not been involved in the creation of the movie looks at it, they have a whole different perspective,” he said. “As a film composer, you can’t look at a film from the director’s point of view. You have to look at it completely objectively.”

Horner composed the scores for Braveheart, A Beautiful Mind, Avatar and many other movies. A longtime collaborator of James Cameron’s, he won the Oscar for his original score for Titanic, as well as the Oscar for best original song for “My Heart Will Go On.” He was nominated for a total of ten Academy Awards.

Horner died in a plane crash near Santa Barbara on June 22, 2015. He was 61. And while we’ve never been able to post his TED Talk because it contained film clips that require rights clearance, we wanted to share the first seven minutes of it. It’s a meditation on an unusual art form — one where the artist works in service of another’s vision and isn’t able to return to ideas and themes they want to explore. He said, “Each time out must be a completely clean canvas.”

His talk is remarkable in that, while Horner details the challenges inherent in composing for film, his passion for the craft shines through.

Abe Davis begins his talk in Session 1 of TED2015 by showing what appear to be two still images — a closeup of the inside of a wrist, a sleeping baby in a crib. But these are not photographs, he says; they are videos. Even if we can’t see them, there are tiny motions in the frame: the blood pulsing, the baby breathing.

“We created software that finds the subtle motions in video and amplifies them so they become big enough for us to see,” Davis says, showing the images again, this time processed to magnify the tiny motions in the video. Now it’s easy to see a pulse in the wrist, to see the baby’s chest lift and fall.

The team led his team to another question: Could they use this video technique to see sound? Sound causes all objects to vibrate, Davis reminds us. “What if we record those vibrations with a high-speed camera and use software to extract tiny motions, and see what made those sounds?”

In an early experiment, Davis and his team filmed an image of a plant at thousands of frames per second — while playing “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” The music shook the leaves imperceptibly. But by analyzing the high-resolution video and extracting the tiny movements, then extrapolating what might have caused those movements, the team was able to extract an only slightly degraded version of the song. How is this possible? As Davis says, the music moves the leaves about a micrometer, or one thousandth of a millimeter. But taken en masse, these tiny movements “add up to something perceptible.”

A specialized camera is set up to film a potato chip bag through a piece of soundproof glass — and the vibrations of the bag reveal words spoken nearby. Photo: Bret Hartman/TED

For another demo, the team set up a specialized high-speed camera behind soundproof glass, and spoke the lyrics of “Mary Had a Little Lamb” in the vicinity of an empty potato chip bag. Again, they were able to recover sound — this time, spoken words. They filmed a pair of earbuds plugged into a computer playing music; from the video, they extracted audio so clear they could Shazam it to identify the song.

The next question: Could they do this with video equipment that didn’t cost tens of thousands of dollars? The team modified their algorithm to use the rolling shutter of an ordinary camera to detect tiny, invisible motions. And again, from a recorded bag of candy: “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”

Before he continues, Davis wants to acknowledge a concern. “People hear about this technology and immediately think about surveillance,” he says. “Keep in mind, there’s already a lot of mature technology out there for surveillance.” (As he tells Chris Anderson later in a Q&A, “people have been using lasers to eavesdrop for decades.”) What’s more exciting to him: Building a new lens to see the way the world works.

From here, Davis wants to show us something a little different — something that he’s only been working on for a few months. He was curious: Could we use this video technique to learn about the physical properties of an object, to predict how it would move? Though this new tech is yet unpublished, Davis gives us a sneak peek at a video technique that analyzes how an object moves, then generates a clickable image that moves just like the actual object. (We promise to bring you this video as soon as we can.)

Chris Anderson introduced this talk by saying that we were about to see a technology that could be as game-changing as Jeff Han’s touchscreen demo in 2006, a year ahead of the iPhone. Davis stresses the potential here too. “We’re just starting to scratch the surface with what we can do with this type of imaging,” he says. “It gives us a new way to capture our surroundings.”

Many people feel a burst of inspiration after watching a TED Talk. Some take action by volunteering their time or making a donation. Nigel Gordon, on the other hand, has an individual reaction: He writes songs about TED Talks he loves.

A singer and songwriter, as well as an entrepreneur, Gordon got his introduction to TED when a friend sent him Sir Ken Robinson’s “How schools kill creativity.” “I’ve been a TED addict ever since,” he says.

In 2012, Gordon heard Sugata Mitra’s talk “The child-driven education,” which tells the story of what happened when Mitra embedded a computer in a wall in a slum in India, and came back to discover that kids had used it to teach themselves a wide range of subjects. (Mitra would go on to win the 2013 TED Prize for his idea, the School in the Cloud.) Gordon was captivated by this idea.

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Speaking of death, Gordon was also very moved by Stephen Cave’s talk, “The 4 stories we tell ourselves about death.” It inspired him to write “A Good Story.” This was a challenging one, however, because Gordon wanted to infuse the heavy subject with the same sense of humor that Cave brought to the stage. Also, Gordon just wasn’t sure how to end the song. “I finally realized I could end it the same way that death ends life: instantly. So I incorporated an abrupt flash-ending,” he says. “The song just … stops.”

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Most recently, Gordon found himself moved by Ziauddin Yousafzai’s talk, “My daughter, Malala.” He already knew the story of the 2015 Nobel Peace Prize winner, but hearing from her father was devastating, he said. A few days later, he happened to watch a talk by Karima Bennoune, in which she pointed out that extremists like Osama Bin Laden are household names in the West, while people like Malala are not as well known. Gordon decided it was time to start writing again. “Ma-la-la. Her name itself is pure music,” he says.

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Gordon has a vision for this song—he’d love to record it with a group, “We Are the World”-style. “My dream: that the ‘Malala’ song be turned into an anthem, to support Malala’s global, peaceful fight for a girl’s right to an education,” he says.

Gordon admits that he did once attempt to write a song about TED itself, but that this endeavor didn’t go so well.

“I couldn’t manage to personalize the song or to make it a story,” he says. “It ended up more like a wordy PowerPoint presentation.”

But still, he says, his TED-inspired songs are not limited to the three above. “TED Talks have significantly enriched my life and widened my range of interests,” he says. “In that sense, many of my songs written in the past four years reflect the impact that TED has had on me.”

Fanfare shares art, music, video remixes and more created by TED fans around our content. Have something you’d like to share? Write kate@ted.com and tell her about it.

]]>http://blog.ted.com/this-fan-writes-songs-about-ted-talks-that-move-him/feed/5Nigel GordonkatetedSinger and songwriter Nigel Gordon writes songs on his guitar inspired by TED Talks.Why we need to build the stuff of science fiction: A teen reporter talks to a music technologisthttp://blog.ted.com/a-teen-reporter-talks-to-a-music-technologist/
http://blog.ted.com/a-teen-reporter-talks-to-a-music-technologist/#commentsThu, 20 Nov 2014 01:00:55 +0000http://blog.ted.com/?p=94123[…]]]>

Gil Weinberg creates musically included robots so good they can improvise. The founder of the Music Technology program at Georgia Tech, he also creates innovative music apps and has contributed his technologies to many a band and ensemble.

Sam Roth, an 11th grader in New York City, was excited to interview Weinberg about his experience speaking at TEDYouth 2014. Below, an edited transcript of their conversation.

How did you get involved with music technology?

I was a musician first — I played piano until college. Only when I got to college did I start to get interested in computation and computer science. Then I thought that it could be an interesting idea to combine both of them. I was playing with a jazz band and, at some point, I thought maybe I could write software to listen to my music and improvise. I thought it could be something new and unique. So I started to write software that actually analyzed music, that complements and improvises.

It went from music to computation. When I got to Georgia Tech after I finished my PhD studies, I started to get interested in robotics. I just grew tired of the electronic sound that comes from speakers. Since everything I did was software and all the music came from speakers, it wasn’t rich. It didn’t have the expression that acoustic sound has. It was the same kind of idea — let the computer inspire me to create something interesting — but this time with acoustic sound.

You came to the U.S. from Israel. How was your work impacted by both the American and Israeli tech scenes?

I believe that we’re global citizens. My inspiration actually came at places here in the States — places that were full of people from all over the world. The MIT Media Lab and Georgia Tech are very international. My horizons were opened more by having more nationalities around — and people with different ways of thinking — than by any single national culture.

Unfortunately, since I became a professor and started teaching, I haven’t been coding as much as I used to. You find yourself less connected to the wires, so to speak. Whenever I do, I enjoy it very much. One way I do stay connected is in actually playing music. I try to have a set point, when the robot is ready, where I can play. So at least I get to be connected to the low-level mechanism with the music.

What I spend the most time on is thinking. Designing with my eyes. Then I take out a pencil and start brainstorming. I come up with ideas on what’s missing in the current state of the project, to take it as far as possible — but also to have it be buildable. We’re working on brain waves controlling a robotic prosthetic arm, which sounds impossible. The trick is to take something that sounds a little bit science fiction-y and find ways in which you can actually do it.

What made you decide to speak at TEDYouth this year?

I was very excited about interacting with teenagers. I think it’s a very cool idea to have an event with kids who are willing to think about big ideas. I had read the list of speakers, which was very interesting. And I wanted to meet all of them. But mostly I was excited about the interactions before and after my talk. I wanted to see what the kids had to say.

Since a big theme of the conference was changing the future, what would be your one message to the next generation?

Keep on creating and building. Keep on questioning what you have and what’s around you. Always ask yourself if there’s something else that you can create or make better. I’m not a religious guy, and some people relate not believing in some kind of higher power with not being a believer. But I’m a very big believer. My belief is in being creative and coming up with new ideas.

Technologist Kate Stone creates posters that you can play—as in, they actually make music. Here’s the story of how she ended up on the TED stage. Photo: James Duncan Davidson/TED

Kate Stone’s journey to the TED stage began, of all places, in a London bar.

In 2012, TED Curator Chris Anderson and Content Director Kelly Stoetzel embarked on a worldwide talent search, traveling to 14 cities on six continents. In each city, they hosted live events to find amazing speakers, and 34 of them ended up being invited to develop their talks for the TED2013 stage.

After the London event, in April 2012, Stoetzel headed out for drinks with some of the speakers and attendees.

“We were hanging out and talking,” says Stoetzel. “And then Klaudia Oliver, a TEDx organizer and friend, tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘You have to meet this woman who was an attendee at the event today. Check out what’s in her bag.’”

That’s when Stoetzel met Kate Stone, founder of the British technology and printing firm Novalia. Stone pulled out some posters from her bag and began playing them as musical instruments. She creates electronic circuits that can be printed on paper, allowing her to play music with her fingers or a controller.

Stone remembers it well: “When I was unrolling my posters, stuff was falling out of my bag and scattering all over the floor. I get too excited about what I do,” she says. “I was showing Kelly my stuff, in this bar that was all a bit posh and serious and refined. I remember playing some beats. I almost got us kicked out.”

Stone describes herself as the one who is always last to leave a party, because she never picks up on the signals about when it’s time to go home. It was thanks to her late-night presence that Stoetzel got to see her work. “I was totally fascinated,” says Stoetzel. “Kate told me more about her work and I asked, ‘Why didn’t you apply for the TED@London event? How about if you come speak at TED@Amsterdam?” It was the very last worldwide talent search event.

Stone did. She had a couple of months to prepare her talk, and delivered it to big applause at TED@Amsterdam in August, and Stoetzel and the TED content team invited her to give a longer version of the talk onstage at TED2013.

Kate Stone: DJ decks made of... paper
To prepare for her longer talk, Stone took an outline approach. She thought about the main points that she wanted to cover, and decided to improvise everything in between. She wanted to sound off-the-cuff and not too rehearsed. It made for a suspenseful moment or two as the demos kicked into gear — but when they did, her joy was infectious.

Stone says that her talk has significantly boosted her professional life. “It’s the best business card ever to have spoken at TED,” says Stone. “I get feedback and emails quite often from people who have seen it and want to work with me and my team at Novalia.”

Maybe the most exciting part for Stone: A collaboration with the legendary DJ QBert on his latest double album, Extraterrestria. The upcoming album (on vinyl, of course) will ship in a cardboard gatefold sleeve covered in printed circuits from Novalia, turning the entire sleeve into a scratchable turntable setup that connects to a DJ app via Bluetooth, so every fan can remix the album.

More than a year after Stone’s talk at TED2013, she continues to hear from artists, scientists and companies across the globe who want to collaborate. But her proudest moment on the TED stage relates neither to her talk nor to the unique way in which she was discovered.

“I’m massively proud of being the first transgender person to speak at TED, without bringing that up in my talk,” Stone says. “Other transgender people do a great job of talking about the transgender community, which is of course extremely necessary and good for the world. But I also believe that it’s important to just get on stage and talk about what we do without primarily defining ourselves as transgender. I want to be a good role model in that way.”

]]>http://blog.ted.com/a-ted-speaker-discovered-in-a-bar/feed/3Kate StonecloeshashaTechnologist Kate Stone creates posters that you can play—as in, they actually make music. Here's the story of how she ended up on the TED stage. Photo: James Duncan DavidsonThe joy and agony of translating song lyricshttp://blog.ted.com/the-joy-and-agony-of-translating-song-lyrics/
http://blog.ted.com/the-joy-and-agony-of-translating-song-lyrics/#commentsTue, 16 Sep 2014 18:59:05 +0000http://blog.ted.com/?p=91783[…]]]>

Earlier this year, the TED staff wrote a musical, complete with an original song called “We’ll Make a TED Talk Out of You.” Our translation volunteers had quite a time bringing it into their own languages. Photo: TED

By Kate Torgovnick May and Krystian Aparta

Music is the universal language. So why, then, do so many songs get translated? Sometimes, bands adapt their lyrics into English to reach international audiences—which explains why so few of us can sing ABBA in the band members’ native Swedish. Other times, songs are adapted into local languages for international release, as exemplified by this 25-language compilation of “Let It Go” from Disney’s Frozen.

Lyrics translators are faced with a painful trade-off: do you go for accuracy or strive to make the translation singable?
TED staff: It's TED, the Musical
But our Open Translation Project volunteers working on the parody video “TED, the musical” found themselves dealing with an even bigger challenge: How do you translate comedy lyrics and, on top of that, make them work as printed subtitles?

Khalid Marbou, who translates TED Talks into Arabic, initially hesitated on whether to take on this translation at all. “I figured that no matter how good I made it, it still would feel weird to read something in a completely different rhyme than what you are listening to. It felt like an impossible task,” he says. But in the end, he was glad he accepted the challenge. “I tried my best, and it certainly was a lot of fun. It turned translation into more of a creative process.”

Translator Stanislav Korotygin also emphasized the creative joy of bringing this madcap talk into Russian, but admits that translating lyrics is alway a difficult balancing act. “It’s like searching for the best path through the forest which must satisfy several conflicting criteria: it must be the shortest, the nicest and the safest. And you have to meet the wolf on the way,” he jokes. “You start thinking like a poet or songwriter.”

But what works in one language may not be possible in others. To Japanese translator Kazunori Akashi, the main goal was making the subtitles short enough to enable viewers to easily follow the video, while also following Japanese lyrical traditions. “I tried to adopt the conventional Japanese style of lyrics, namely using phrases which consist of five or seven syllables,” he explains. “For example, when I translated the line ‘It’s your time to shine,’ I did ‘Kimi-ga-kagayaku / toki-ga-kita,’ which are seven and five-syllable phrases.” And to Mile Živković, the number of syllables proved to be the biggest challenge in the Serbian translation. “It required me to compress everything so that I could imagine singing it in Serbian,” he says. “Initially, I attempted to make the entire song rhyme, but it proved virtually impossible with the line length.”

“TED, the Musical” has now been translated into 30+ languages, and counting. Krystian Aparta, TED’s Localization Community Manager who’s worked with many Polish bands on translating their songs, is in awe of the OTP volunteers’ results on this talk. “There’s so much work that goes into translating lyrics: you need to think about the connotations of the words, rhymes, alliteration, which words will be stressed by the singer, how to adapt the song to make as much sense in the target culture… By translating these lyrics and bringing the fun and humor in this video to so many audiences all over the world, these guys are truly proving that music can be the universal language.”

]]>http://blog.ted.com/the-joy-and-agony-of-translating-song-lyrics/feed/0TED the Musical, 2014.tedstaffTED the Musical, 2014.Somi unveils an odyssey of song and soul in ‘The Lagos Music Salon’http://blog.ted.com/somi-unveils-an-odyssey-of-song-and-soul-in-the-lagos-music-salon/
http://blog.ted.com/somi-unveils-an-odyssey-of-song-and-soul-in-the-lagos-music-salon/#commentsFri, 08 Aug 2014 16:52:20 +0000http://blog.ted.com/?p=91212[…]]]>

This week, East African singer Somi releases her first major-label album, The Lagos Music Salon, in the United States. Already, it is #1 on the iTunes Jazz Chart, #1 on the Amazon Jazz Vocal Chart, and #1 on the Amazon Pop Vocal Chart. The TED Blog caught up with the jazz-soul vocalist and songwriter—who was was born in Illinois to Rwandan and Ugandan parents and traveled frequently to East Africa—to talk about taking risks, navigating creativity within a multicultural life, and the artistic promptings that led her to explore the city of Lagos.

Tell us about your new album, The Lagos Music Salon. Does it refer to a real salon?

It was inspired by a recent 18-month creative sabbatical I took in Lagos, Nigeria. I called it a “salon” for a number of reasons — including a regular performance series I began while collaborating with fellow artists I was meeting in Lagos. But it’s also about creating a space for reflective conversations I was having with myself and with the city itself.

The idea for the performance salons came out of what I thought was a lack of intimate cultural spaces in Lagos that allowed for real artist-to-audience engagement. Even though Nigeria has this huge culture and music and art scene, the performance spaces are limited — shockingly so. I found that the performance spaces were mostly either these tiny places where the performer served as background music, or these hyper-produced, overpriced spaces, most of which were hotel conference rooms. At the time, I couldn’t find anywhere that regularly allowed for and encouraged the fundamental conversation between artist and audience.

While creating this new music, I wanted to be able to have that kind of concert and conversation with the Nigerian audience. At the time, I was writing my experience of the city, and I wanted to get critical feedback from from Lagosian people to know whether I was appropriately representing the experiences of Lagos living. I wanted my work to be something that Lagosians could be proud of, too. So I began producing salons. The very first one was more of an atelier — a showcase of work in progress. A friend of mine owns an art gallery, the African Artists Foundation, in a neighborhood called Ikoyi. We set up 66 chairs, had some hors d’oeuvres, organized a reception, and I performed all of the new material with my newly formed Lagos band. We were surrounded by all this beautiful artwork. Afterwards, we had champagne and cupcakes.

What was the initial response?

The initial response was wonderful — many people in the audience told me they connected with the work and really appreciated it. That feedback was critical for me, as was the experience of hearing it myself in a live context—experiencing how the work lived in my own body. I decided to produce more salons. I invited local artists to participate, and it just grew into this thing that happened every few months. It was a wonderful space for me to work through the music before going into the studio to record it. It also was a wonderful way of engaging the local arts community and establishing relationships with fellow musicians who were there. It was also an incredible learning experience in terms of taking off my often overly-cerebral, New Yorker jazz head to experience and create music on a more visceral level. I got to work with African musicians who have a very different kind of creative process than the New York-trained or conservatory musician might.

Above: watch the album teaser for The Lagos Music Salon, Somi’s major label debut on Sony’s OKeh imprint, released this week.

Why Lagos, specifically, and not a city in Uganda or Rwanda, where your parents are from?

There are a number of reasons. One, I was always very curious about the cultural energy there. I had been before to visit and to perform, and I realized how many parallels there were between Lagos and New York, in terms of size, energy, pace. It’s actually bigger than New York — 20 million people — and it’s always been a cultural giant on the African continent in terms of music, literature, fashion and visual arts. They’ve got the third largest film industry in the world.

So I was curious: Why is there so much cultural production in Lagos? What is it about the place that makes it such a cultural force? I mean, it’s partly a numbers game, because one out of every four Africans is Nigerian, but there’s something really special about the place. It’s not just about this moment, when everybody — no matter what industry — is looking at Africa as this new, emerging market to invest in. It’s about generations of cultural export and leadership. In the ’70s, every major label was actually in Lagos. Everybody passed through there, whether you’re talking about a Miles Davis or a Miriam Makeba or Nina Simone or Hugh Masekela.

I also moved there because I was curious about how, as an African woman, being in an African city might affect my lyrical, musical narratives and impulses. I decided not to go to my home cities of Kigali or Kampala because I didn’t want my experience colored by familiarity. I also thought I might have felt pressured by cultural expectations and obligations. The discovery of Lagos afforded me the privilege, and maybe freedom, of being a foreigner, and with that came a number of opportunities. Basically, I wanted to go somewhere that gave me enough Africanisms to help me feel at home, but enough “foreignness” to keep my perspective totally fresh.

There are also substantial financial resources that the Nigerian government has committed to investing in the cultural sector. That was the first time I’d seen that in an African context. The World Bank came out with a report some years ago about how, in the global recession, creative economies in the developing world were the only place that they saw remarkable growth. The Nigerian film industry alone created about 100,000 jobs in 2011.

Did you have a residency there to start with?

Initially, I was invited to teach a residency at a university about five hours north of Lagos. I used that as a soft landing. After the first month I decided to stay for 15 months. While completing the residency, I found partnerships that gave me the support system necessary to set up there for the additional months. But I had no agenda when I moved. I just wanted to get out of New York, after having been there for a decade. I’d just lost my father, and I wanted to heal my heart. I also just walked away from my label, my management, my agent — all at once. I felt either I’d outgrown them, or we still just hadn’t gotten to this understanding of the larger story I’m trying to tell.

Artistically, I had so much more I wanted to say. As an African woman living in the United States, I have to negotiate my identity as an African and a Westerner, whereas on the continent, I am in a more transnational cultural space. I was curious how my work would shift once I was no longer culling over my cultural heritage through a diasporic lens. It’s a very romantic lens because you’re always sort of celebrating or privileging a longed-for place. Now, when I listen to Fela Kuti in Lagos, for example, I understand and hear it completely differently. That understanding could only have come from here. I loved his music from the perspective of an East African in New York. But now that I’ve experienced where the music is from, I realize there’s so much more that I had not heard or identified in the music before. So I think what I’m most proud of with this record is that there’s a keen sense of place that’s so fundamentally inside of it. I hope when people hear it, they feel as though they’ve traveled with me.

Above: watch the music video for “Last Song,” a track from The Lagos Music Salon. “If this were my last song, would you hum along? If this were my last song, would you try to remember everything?”

It’s a pretty courageous thing to do, to just move to another country.

Six months into it, I kind of had a freak-out moment. Like, what have I done? Did I just throw my career in the toilet? I felt like I was just out there in the wind, writing, and not knowing what I was necessarily there to say or talk about. Then, suddenly, I found that this body of work was emerging. It was mostly through my journals, snippets of melodies in the sound diary I was creating with my pocket recorder, or poetry that I had written. I realized it was, again, not about a particular genre. I mean, if you listen to the record, it’s got jazz, soul, some hip-hop, both traditional and popular Nigerian music, and other stuff. I decided not to censor those impulses.

I think, for me, that was what was the most frustrating for me as an artist prior to going to Nigeria—that folks always want to put you in a box. I understand that to commodify our art at times, people need to put labels on it. But that was very frustrating for me, because I am not just a jazz musician, I’m not only an African voice. I have all these influences. How can I not—as a half-Ugandan, half-Rwandan who grew up between Illinois and Zambia and who is living between New York and Lagos?

Speaking of genre, is this album a huge departure for you? You’re known in the jazz community — and this album is being released on Sony’s jazz-based imprint.

I would say my career has been rooted in the jazz community, but jazz is not my musical pedigree per se. There are a lot of purists who’d say I’m not really jazz, because I’m not that singer who sings a long list of standards. I’m a songwriter, first and foremost. The fact that I ended up in the jazz room is sort of a running joke in my band, because I’m always like, “How did we get here?” I don’t remember even hearing jazz until I was in college for the first time. My parents didn’t really listen to it.

What did they listen to?

My mom is a huge lover of Western classical music. She loves opera. She is also a great keeper of Western Ugandan folk songs. She has a beautiful voice. She’s not a professional singer, but she’s a beautiful singer. And my father listened to a lot of what you might call world music roots sort of stuff. I studied the cello, and listened to a lot of classical music as a young person, most of my life. We lived in Champaign, Illinois, which is a small university town. The radio offerings at the time in the ’80s weren’t so diverse.

I think that most African-Americans who have a more “indigenous” cultural and social African-American experience have a different engagement with jazz because it’s more their own cultural legacy. That’s not really the case for African immigrant families. There are a lot of Africans who love jazz, but there also many who just aren’t exposed to it. It’s very rare to have grown up listening to jazz as an African child.

There is, but it developed in very particular pockets on the continent — mainly South Africa and Ethiopia — and has very strongly rooted traditions. And it’s a very specific kind of sound. Interestingly, you’ll usually find very parallel or mirrored social and political movements between the African experience and the American experience in terms of civil rights. Especially South Africa: South African jazz developed in conjunction with its apartheid and civil rights movements, parallel to how it played out in the US. The reality, though, is that what we know as American jazz is directly linked to African music, so there really should be more of a conversation between here and there anyway.

How much did you notice that there was a disconnect between the musical heritage of your youth and that of your African-American peers?

It wasn’t that it was an issue. I think the reason I ended up ultimately being drawn to jazz was that it’s a genre that expects, if not demands, improvisation. And it also privileges the individual voice in an ensemble. Not to say that other genres don’t appreciate improv or don’t appreciate the individual members of a group, but the trademark solo improvisation in jazz — being willing to be a very clear individual voice in an ever-changing ensemble — always felt like an appropriate musical metaphor that reflects my own social malleability, and the improvisation necessary as a person whose life includes very layered social and cultural experiences. Maybe that’s why the jazz audience were the first to get what I’m doing. I find that when people don’t know how to define a type of music, we just call it “jazz,” right?

But I’ve also learned a great deal from the musicians I’ve surrounded myself with, and my band members, because I find that jazz musicians have the widest musical vocabulary. That’s probably because they’re always being asked to improvise, not just play what’s on the page, which was a huge departure for me as somebody who grew up mostly in the classical music idiom. It freed me in a lot of ways. It allowed me to be all of myself, to bring in the African influences, and make space for my Midwestern, maybe soul influences, and my classical roots, and not feel problematic. If anything, it made my music richer.

I began work on this album long before I was signed to Sony, and when I started I was prepared to put this record out entirely independently. I decided, “I’m just going to be all of myself. Whatever I feel like the music or my voice is asking for, or deserves, or wants to say, or how it wants to say it — that’s what I’m going to honor first. I’ll deal with how that fits into a commercial context when the work is done.” But I’m very happy that Sony is committed to helping me manifest that vision.

Sure. The record has two producers, from Lagos and New York, who complemented each other with kind of the jazz-head and the African pop sensibilities. Cobhams Asuquo, based in Lagos, is one of the most celebrated producers on the African continent right now. My New York-based producer Keith Witty is also a beautiful bass player and composer.

And I have a couple of really amazing special guests — Angélique Kidjo and Common, both of whom are Grammy-winning artists. I’m honored that they agreed to be a part of this, Angélique being like an older sister — originally from Benin — and Common being a wonderful MC. He’s on the song “When Rivers Cry,” which is about the environment, about the need for a committed green movement on the African continent. I wrote it when Wangari Maathai, the first African female Nobel Prize Laureate, passed away.

Angélique and I did a piece called “Lady Revisited,” a reinterpretation of Fela Kuti’s original “Lady,” but speaking out against domestic violence and legislation that’s not in favor of women in some parts of the African continent. Angélique has always been a real womanist and a champion of African female causes, so I wanted to have her voice on it.

Ambrose Akinmusire, a Nigerian-American trumpet player out of the West Coast, plays on “Brown Round Things,” a song about a loss of innocence. There’s just a whole cast of both American and African artists, both in Lagos and in New York.

What next?

I’m in the process of trying to create a salon tour, which I’m super excited about. Instead of doing typical shows in typical concert venues, I’m collaborating with a number of community art spaces to recreate the original Lagos-style salons. The first of these will happen in a few major US cities this September, but we’ll also collaborate with African arts communities in those cities. I hope to help people really experience what that first salon felt like, with the 66 chairs and the cupcakes, the truth-telling and the intimacy.

Overall, I hope this project helps people to think about African narratives in a more nuanced manner. I think people expected me to come back from Nigeria with a very particular sound. I want people to come away with an understanding that there are very singular, personal experiences and stories that need to be told. I’m hoping to play my part in championing some of those voices and stories.

]]>http://blog.ted.com/somi-unveils-an-odyssey-of-song-and-soul-in-the-lagos-music-salon/feed/2Somi_BW0A1775A_983pxmmechinitaSomi_BW0A1775A_983pxSomi embraces Lagos with open arms. For more of Somi's images of Lagos, vist her site www.somimusic.com.Somi and the colors of Lagos. Photo: www.somimusic.comIdeas make you dance: Grupo TEDx writes cumbia songs from talkshttp://blog.ted.com/ideas-make-you-dance-grupo-tedx-writes-cumbia-songs-from-tedx-talks/
http://blog.ted.com/ideas-make-you-dance-grupo-tedx-writes-cumbia-songs-from-tedx-talks/#commentsThu, 12 Jun 2014 14:20:52 +0000http://blog.ted.com/?p=90473[…]]]>

Some great ideas make you want to get up and dance. Ever wondered what Stewart Brand’s talk on de-extincting animals would sound like set to music? Even if the answer is no, which it likely is, today is your lucky day. A band called Grupo TEDx has written such a song, giving Brand’s talk some serious Latin flair. Listening may well inspire hip-shaking.

“We wanted to make these ideas even more popular,” says Javier Mentasti, the executive creative director at Ogilvy and Mather Argentina whose team came up with the idea for the band and made it a reality. “We wanted to use the famous Latin American beat—cumbia—to put the talks into rhythms and into the mouth of every single person singing.”

He says that the band intentionally chose a wide range of talks for their songs. “We tried to cover all the TED world—technology, culture, innovation,” Mentasti says. “Every song brings out an idea that we thought would inspire Latin American people the most. But, between us, ‘Medellîn’ was our favorite. Great talk, and great for cumbia.”

Alastair Parvin, for one, was very excited to hear the cumbia version of his talk. “Frankly, it makes the original talk seem rather dull by comparison! I think from now on I’ll make a point of only ever giving talks if these guys can come and be the backing band,” he says. “On a more serious note, though, there is something quite cool about the idea of reviving the traditional idea of storytelling in music, of spreading ideas like traveling folk musicians and taking ideas out of their academic setting. I like the idea of it being overheard by accident somewhere incredibly unexpected.”

In all, Grupo TEDx played 30 shows, reaching an estimated 962,000 listeners. As for whether the band will ever reunite, Mentasti says it’s in the realm of possibility. “It would be difficult—this was done with a very, very low budget,” he says. “But when you get inspired by a TEDx talk, you never know.”

Listen to Grupo TEDx’s first volume of songs below. And then hope that they make more.

Fanfare shares art, music, video remixes and more created by TED fans around our content. Have something you’d like to share? Write kate@ted.com and tell her about it.

Jose Antonio Abreu made a TED Prize wish in 2009 to train 50 musicians to start youth orchestras in their community. The final class of Sistema Fellows graduated this month. Photo: Andrew Hurlbut at NEC

On a drizzly spring day in Boston earlier this month, three dozen musicians mingled in the President’s Library of the New England Conservatory (NEC), one of the most prestigious music institutions in the country. The weather did not dampen the infectious enthusiasm in the room. After all, 10 of these musicians were about to mark a milestone: graduation from the competitive Sistema Fellows Program, an initiative born out of El Sistema and made a reality by the TED Prize.

El Sistema is a network of youth orchestras founded by pianist and conductor Jose Antonio Abreu in 1975. Officially called the “National System of Youth and Children Symphony Orchestras of Venezuela,” El Sistema (“the system”) teaches orchestral instruments to Venezuelan children from poor and crowded barrios. In some cases the kids become income-earning musicians (like LA Philharmonic conductor Gustavo Dudamel); but in all cases kids learn lessons about citizenship, responsibility and working together. In 2009, Abreu won the TED Prize and wished to bring El Sistema to the United States. He proposed a training program to equip 50 young musicians to lead youth orchestras in their communities. The 10 Fellows about to graduate represented the program’s final class of musicians trained not just to play, but to lead, plan, fundraise and create sustainable local music programs.

The energy and excitement were palpable as the soon-to-be graduates munched on Middle Eastern food and talked with Fellows from previous years, who came from as far away as Alaska to support the final class. The 50 Fellows are a tight-knit group, bonded by their love of music, but also by the fact that they’d endured a challenging 9-month fellowship; the impact was clear even as they struggled to put the experience into words. The general consensus was that the program “grew” them in more ways than they could have expected.

“One of the things I realized here is that being a musician, you have to know more than just how to play your instrument,” said Laura Jekel, a cellist who joined the Sistema Fellows Program in 2010. “That never came up for me in any of my conservatory training in the past. It was always just play, play, play.”

The Sistema Fellows Program, housed at the NEC, was indeed about more than musicianship. The intensive curriculum focused on leadership and community development, and included a month‐long residency in Venezuela. During this residency, the Fellows saw El Sistema in action and got to know Abreu.

Jose Antonio Abreu has created a web of youth orchestras across Venezuela, and now across the United States. Photo: El Sistema

Abreu’s vision for El Sistema, too, is about more than making music — his vision has always been more about creating community. For him, an orchestra brings people together, and the US-based Sistema Fellows are ambassadors for his big-picture thinking. They 50 of them landed in the program because of their passion for playing music, teaching music and using music to foster understanding between people of diverse backgrounds.

“I’ve always had a real interest in combining music with social change and a passion for building strong communities, even in high school,” said Andrea Landin, a California native and cellist who graduated from the program last year. “I would like to see orchestras better reflect the community, and move away from this idea that it’s a niche thing. An orchestra should be seen as a resource, not as an elite institution.”

A year after graduating, Landin is now the Education Manager at New West Symphony Harmony Project in Ventura, California, which teaches music to 95 at-risk students. They practice in a funky art space, peppered with artwork by local artists, and join up with local organizations to put on jazz jam sessions.

Meanwhile, cellist Jekel is relishing working with kids in Ohio, where she is the Program Director at Music for Youth in Cincinnati. “I live in the same neighborhood where my program is, and I love seeing kids who are in the program walking up and down the street or in the supermarket with their families,” she said. “It’s not outreach at all. I feel like I’m part of the community; I’m just part of the neighborhood.”

The graduation ceremony began in the cozy quarters of the NEC. During the two-hour ceremony, each 2014 Fellow took a turn at the podium, sharing a memory of the past year. There was a mixture of laughter and crying, and a flurry of inside jokes.

Eriel Huang, about to graduate, teared up as she gave her graduation speech, with her mom watching from Cape Town via Skype. Huang, who was born in Taiwan and raised in South Africa, played the electric violin in a touring band before joining the program. “Music for me has always been about sharing. It was never about the performance, but about bringing music to all types of communities and being able to share in that joy,” she said. Through the Fellows program, she developed an interest in mediation and diplomacy, and hopes to pursue a career in cultural diplomacy, possibly at the United Nations.

Andrea Landin doesn’t just play beautiful music. She teaches kids in California to love it too. Photo: Natasha Scripture

In the halls of the New England Conservatory, the distant sound of an aria from a Bellini opera blends with a Mozart sonata being brought to life by a student on a Steinway. “In a place like this, it’s easy to think of music as just playing at a higher level, but we want to use it for another purpose,” said Alvaro Rodas, a native of Guatemala and 2010 Fellow who plays percussion.

Rodas now runs the Corona Youth Music Project in Queens, New York. The program is for children between the ages of 4 to 14, and begins with a “pre-orchestra semester,” in which kids use plastic buckets as drums. Chorus classes at the program are taught in English, though the kids predominantly speak Spanish.

In Venezuela, El Sistema has grown exponentially over its 40-year history. It now includes 685 youth, child and infant orchestras — with more than 400,000 young people getting a free classical music education. In the United States, this idea is just starting to take off, thanks to Abreu’s TED Prize wish. These Sistema Fellows are working with at-risk communities in 20 cities. In 2010, when the first class of Fellows entered the field, their programs served about 600 children. Today, the Fellows work with more than 5,000 children through their programs. And with the final class, the number will continue to grow.

The five-year fellowship program may have run its course, but growth for this idea is still very much a possibility. One intriguing thought for the Fellows is that a child in their program may be inspired to do this kind of work, continuing the cycle of growth. “I would love to see my program become self-sustaining in the way that the kids grow up and come back and teach. I want to create a culture of giving back,” said Landin, as she runs her fingers along her cello case.

The NEC hopes to continue the momentum of the program as well. They’ve created the Sistema Fellowship Resource Center, dedicated to the ongoing training of the program’s alumni.

One interesting byproduct of Fellowship is that it’s allowed for cross-cultural exchanges between the US and Venezuela, with the El Sistema program counterparts in both countries talking to each other and working together to ensure the program’s sustainability. At the graduation, Rodrigo Guerrero, Deputy Director of International Development at the Fundacion Musical Simon Bolivar, which runs El Sistema, clinked plastic cups of soda with the Fellows. “Seeing the Fellowship come to an end is sad. But it’s also a moment of great pride for all the institutions involved—knowing that this field has been created and that it’s growing every year,” says Guerrero. “Thousands of children around the US are getting musical instruction—with the idea of social action, of utilizing music as way to bring communities and families together, of engaging them actively in the community.”

As the Fellows stepped to the podium one by one to deliver their graduation speeches, their passion beamed through. Each sounds thoroughly excited to spread the magic of music as far as it can go. Abreu’s TED Prize wish, put simply, was to teach 50 passionate people how to influence lives through music. The only question is how many they’ll teach from here.

]]>http://blog.ted.com/how-50-music-teachers-are-creating-5000-musician-citizens-in-us/feed/16Abreu-Fellows-featurenatashaprizeJose Abreu wished for these 50 musicians toJose Antonio Abreu made a TED Prize wish in 2009: to train 50 musicians to bring their passion for classical music to kids in their community. Thanks to this wish, more than young people 5,000 are getting a free music education across the United States. Photo: El SistemaAndrea Landin doesn't just play beautiful music. A graduate of the Sistema Fellows US Program, she got the training she needed to teach children how music can change communities. Photo: Natasha ScriptureClassic rock: Dan Visconti, the 21st-century composerhttp://blog.ted.com/dan-visconti-and-a-new-breed-of-21st-century-composer/
http://blog.ted.com/dan-visconti-and-a-new-breed-of-21st-century-composer/#commentsFri, 23 May 2014 17:52:08 +0000http://blog.ted.com/?p=90237[…]]]>

Dan Visconti is updating the image of the classical composer — from lone, fusty genius to dynamic community leader who creates music as a tool for social engagement. Whether he’s telling the stories of Cleveland’s refugee communities or composing a piece for the Mississippi State Prison, Visconti makes concert experiences that invite people to participate. Classically trained, but with a love of American vernacular musical traditions, Visconti infuses his compositions with a maverick spirit—drawing on jazz, rock, blues and beyond. Here, he tells the TED Blog his vision for how to break through the traditional reserve of classical music, making it accessible to a new generation.

How would you describe your compositions? Are you consistent in your style?

In some ways not. But I’m very consistent in my attitude about music. I guess the best way to say it is that I’m trying to make the composer relevant again—not this old guy with a wig and a quill pen laboring in isolation, but a cultural ambassador and collaborator, someone deeply integrated in the communities that he or she serves. One of the ways I do that is by composing music that’s open to diversity of traditions. Often my pieces sound like they’re not classical music. A piece might have the directness of expression of a great jazz performance, or the sense of audience rapport at a small club venue, or the wildness and improvisatory spirit of a really good rock performance. I also believe that music can play a strong role in social change. I think about Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan, and the great tradition of protest singing in America: using music to transmit a message. What I’d like to do is to go beyond transmitting that as lyrics in a song, to create an experience that immerses the audience and causes them to engage a larger point of inquiry.

Above, watch the Kontras Quartet perform Dan Visconti’s Ramshackle Songs, a work inspired by the spirit of recreational music-making that characterized the Tin Pan Alley-era of American popular music.

Can you give us an example of how this works?

I recently completed a project with the orchestra City Music Cleveland called Roots to Branches. I set to music some of the stories of the city’s nearly 20,000 refugees, who hail from Bhutan, Burma, Burundi, Congo, Iraq, Nepal, Russia, Somalia and Sudan. We created a whole music festival where we brought in musicians and dancers from the refugees’ home cultures, and the piece of music became a focal point to engage a larger cultural issue. It also had the effect of bringing the city’s different refugee communities together—now they’re working together to solve problems.

I’m also interested in anything that can make going to a concert hall special. For example, a lot of pop and rock musicians employ lighting and amplification, raising the bar so high in terms of stimulating the senses. Classical music really has to catch up and take the advantage of all of those things. Take opera. A lot of people who might otherwise really enjoy it are turned off by the operatic style of singing with vibrato. This style originated because vibrato allows the voice to project more volume in times when no amplification was available. It’s no longer necessary, and now pop singers can sing with wonderful, subtle nuance—they can whisper, sigh. But opera is still stuck where it was in 1600.

You’re also doing some exciting site-specific stuff, such as in the Mississippi State Penitentiary. Tell us about that.

That’s a project I’m working on with the Kronos Quartet, who are celebrating their 40th anniversary this year. They’re one of the biggest pioneers in taking so-called classical music and updating it. They’ve brought in the world music, collaborated with people like Philip Glass, Laurie Anderson, Tom Waits. They’ll be performing a piece of mine at this prison called Parchman Farm in Mississippi, properly known as Mississippi State Penitentiary. This is a prison where a lot of the blues greats like Leadbelly and Son House were incarcerated. It’s notorious for being cruel. What we’d like to do is create an event that draws attention to a lot of the crises in our prison systems right now.

I’ve actually been working on this with Robert Vijay Gupta, who is a former TED Fellow and a great violinist with LA Phil, and we’re also working with organizations like the Mississippi Prison Museum and the Southern Poverty Law Center to create the performance event. It has all the aspects of old blues singing, based on some of the Alan Lomax archival recordings from the Smithsonian Folkways collection. We’re also looking at some of the prison food that was served, and making it available to the audience. We’ve got speakers coming down to talk about social conditions, and issues like racism and violence in prison. We want to give people a way into engaging with something they knew about, which they might have felt wasn’t even a problem before. When people are given a visceral, emotional experience, they are often moved to action. I want to impart passion and a desire to get involved to people who wouldn’t get it by attending a symphony concert and reading program notes in a little booklet. That’s just passé at this point.

Visconti is a resident composer for the concert organization Fifth House Ensemble, dedicated to engaging audiences through performance. Photo: Fifth House Ensemble

These pieces sound quite interactive. Do your audiences actually participate in the performance?

Yes. I am working on an educational piece now for Fifth House Ensemble, a performance ensemble I’m a part of whose aims are innovative programming and civic practice. 5HE is very focused on education initiatives in schools, colleges and universities as well as local cultural centers and community gathering places. The piece requires an audience to participate—they play a little toy instrument along with the musicians, so they become part of the performance. It empowers them, because without knowing how to read music, they feel like they can participate. They can be part of something larger than themselves.

I think that’s the kind of thing that classical music has the ability to do that’s difficult for pop music to do. I think that’s the balance I’m trying to create—drawing on the things that are really strong about non-classical traditions, but also looking at what’s special about classical music. Of course, there is something special about something as basic as hearing a Beethoven symphony played live. I hope that by doing some of these more interactive projects, I will also help make it more possible for people to enjoy a simple symphony. It’s all connected.

You don’t perform your own work at all. Why did you decide to become a composer, and not an instrumentalist?

My parents started me on violin when I was about 5 years old. One of the best things they ever did for me was that they let me stop, because I absolutely hated it. I don’t know why, but after six months, I didn’t want to do it. They always encouraged me to try everything, and always gave me the best support I could hope for, but they were always okay if I didn’t like something. Had I continued, I’m sure I would have developed mad technical chops, but it would have been a soulless endeavor since it didn’t feel like a pursuit of my own. Yet.

But when I was about 17, I heard a violinist who was a little bit older than me playing some solo Bach, and it was just so beautiful. It motivated me. I started a job to save up money for lessons, and it was my own thing. I had my own relationship with music that wasn’t about doing it for my parents.

But I was always getting yelled at by my violin teachers because I could learn instruments very quickly, but I would plateau and start improvising different endings to Mozart pieces and stuff. I gradually realized maybe composing was where my strength actually lay—coming up with different situations that could happen in music. So I pivoted from performance to composing. I had just started at the Cleveland Institute of Music, and I made the full switch to being a music composition major.

To the relief of your teachers?

Much to their relief, and perhaps their chagrin as well.

Above, watch Chase Jarvis’s short film Benevolent Mischief, which features Visconti’s score that blends the sound of a classical cello — played by TED Fellow Joshua Roman — with harder-edged beats from the world of hip-hop.

We know what it looks like to perform or conduct, but what is the process of composing music and getting it into the world?

People tend to commission me to write music for specific occasions. I’m not as brilliant a thinker as Beethoven, but I can do things that he can’t do, because he’s dead. I can tailor-make a piece exactly to a particular ensemble, for a particular occasion—whether it’s expressing the stories of refugees, or honoring a particular historical site. One family even commissioned a piece privately for their children to teach them to learn values around sharing, interacting and cooperation, which I thought was really cool.

I hadn’t realized that ensembles actively seek new composers for music to perform.

Yes. There are a couple of reasons for this. Sometimes major orchestras commission work from new composers because it makes them look good, it makes them look in touch. Beyond that, there are a lot of people who really love new music, and some like to pair new music with an older piece to present it in relief. It can be really exciting to hear Beethoven and then a new piece that sounds more like Jimi Hendrix. It opens up the spectrum. Or I can write a piece of music that takes elements of a Beethoven symphony, and take it in a new direction. A new piece of music can be a way to relate to the past.

So that tends to be the system. I’ll create the pieces, then usually there’s an exclusivity agreement that gives the commissioning organization the rights to recording and performance for a certain amount of time. After that, I make it publicly available on my website, and people can license and perform it.

I could go into a lot of reasons. Classical music is one of the most conservative art forms, and there seems to be a huge lag in development. Often, movements in visual art happen 20 or 40 years before those same movements hit music. For example, Impressionism in the visual arts began as early as the late 1800s, while in music, we don’t get Impressionist composers like Debussy and Ravel until around World War I or a little later.

A lot of it has to do with concert venues. They tend to be conservative organizations, they have boards—they’re slow to change. They can’t react as quickly as, say, a gallery can. They have to program years in advance. So there’s an inherent asymmetry in terms of the ability to be nimble, to deal with new problems and to react to new social phenomena. I think that one of the things that we can do as composers is be those people that are more reactive, that notice what needs to happen before the big organizations do.

So in some ways, people who are like me—working around inherent conservatism and tradition, while also finding ways to respect tradition and use it as an inspiration—are kind of guerrillas on the ground. We’re working with and sometimes within the systems, but also secretly against them. We love them, but we also want them to change.

It sounds like your work is about teaching people to listen differently.

Absolutely—and to think differently about sound, and about what music is. Music is all around us. We’re making it all the time. I’m making music right now: I’m kind of singing. I’m speaking in a certain meter, there’s a certain reciting pitch to my voice. I’m not doing that intentionally or consciously.

There’s music all around, but we just don’t listen for it. That’s something where the West is behind—a lot of Eastern cultures and early pre-industrial cultures are often more close to that. I’ve also realized that in many such cultures, the musicians—shamans—tended to be people who lived somewhat outside of society. There’s a sense that you have to be a little bit removed from a culture to diagnose things that need fixing. Maybe today’s composers can re-engage with that shamanic tradition of a counselor or psychologist. I think that’s the role I feel most comfortable with—trying to help people with music in a direct sense, rather than an indirect one.

]]>http://blog.ted.com/dan-visconti-and-a-new-breed-of-21st-century-composer/feed/75HE 2014 Dans ensemblemmechinitaBlog_FF-DanViscontiVisconti is a resident composer for the concert organization Fifth House Ensemble, which is dedicated to engaging and educating audiences through performance.A ‘Sunken Cathedral': Bora Yoon’s new album builds musical architecture out of sound, sight and theatrical experiencehttp://blog.ted.com/bora-yoon-on-sunken-cathedral/
http://blog.ted.com/bora-yoon-on-sunken-cathedral/#commentsFri, 16 May 2014 22:41:51 +0000http://blog.ted.com/?p=90063[…]]]>

Bora Yoon builds soundscapes out of instruments and found objects from assorted centuries and cultures, weaving an unlikely and undulating web of immersive sound. As a live performer, the Korean-American composer, vocalist and sound architect often seeks interesting spaces in which to work, creating music specifically for each site. Now she’s created Sunken Cathedral, a multimedia album that lets listeners take the experience of sound and space with them. Here, Yoon tells the TED Blog about the ideas behind this dynamic work, which will culminate in a live performance in January 2015.

Yes. It’s an enormous beast of a multi-tentacled project that I have been working on for seven years, and it’s all unveiling now in a four-part, year-long rollout—a transformation from record to the theatrical stage. The Sunken Cathedral album—which Innova Recordings released online and on CD in late April—is essentially a musical blueprint upon which everything else will be built.

A trilogy of interactive music videos will be released this month for the iPad with the Gralbum Collective—it’s short for graphic album (think: visual album)—featuring the dangerously beautiful kinetic sculptures of U-Ram Choe, who is a crazy, wonderful Seoul-based artist. That will give the piece a virtual and cinematic structure to engage with. A series of music videos will follow in the summer by filmmaker Brock Labrenz, Toni Dove, with remixes by King Britt and DJ Scientific. But the whole thing will culminate as a staged multimedia theater production — essentially the experience of the cathedral itself. That will premiere at the PROTOTYPE Festival, co-produced by Beth Morrison Projects and HERE Art Center, in January 2015. So the Indiegogo campaign will help pay for this transformation from record into a staged world premiere.

Above: Watch Bora Yoon perform “Sons Nouveaux” live at TED2014.

You typically do site-specific, live musical performances. What possessed you to make such a massive, multifaceted work?

I wanted to create a project that built itself—like musical architecture—from the invisible to the tangible and visceral. Living in New York City, I was doing one-off events and projects, but as someone whose work is already really hard to define, it felt discouraging to be building what seemed a super-disparate and random body of work. So when I got a recording grant in 2009 from the Sorel Organization for Women Composers, I decided to take the opportunity to chip away at a larger aesthetic. I wanted to show a concept of who I am and help define what my artistic practice actually is about — sound and space, environment, experience.

While working on it, I started to understand that because I work site-specifically — or architecturally — the project would have to be multidimensional and multimedia, so that people can engage with it in different ways. And because we live in such an increasingly visual age, I think you have to make things an experience. You can’t just put out a record. When I make music, I definitely see music. I know what environment I’m making, what memory I’m painting, or environment or landscape I’m evoking. These videos are a way for me to show that. It’s visual poetry to support the sonic language that’s happening.

You’re a classically trained musician, right?

Yes. I had a very stereotypical Asian-American upbringing outside of Chicago — with piano, Suzuki violin. I started singing in junior high, and that was really my first love. Choral music was where I started to notice how vertical and horizontal music can happen at the same time. Even though you’re singing one part within many, you’re aware of the vertical staff: you make harmony and chords that are going by in the horizontal aspect of time, and the arc of phrases. When you put vertical and horizontal together, the feeling of transport happens. I always feel art is successful when you can take people somewhere. That’s the litmus test for me. Have you transported people somewhere, and returned them transformed? It’s a ride.

Above: Watch “Father Time” from Sunken Cathedral, directed by filmmaker Adam Larsen, and featuring the kinetic sculpture of Seoul-based artist U-Ram Choe. It’s the first of three interactive music videos releasing on new iPad app Gralbum this May.

I majored in music and creative writing at Ithaca College, living between a conservatory setting and a town that was liberal enough to foster this singer-songwriter poetry scene, as well as having underground electronic parties. That weird, disparate identity in college shaped who I am now. The poet singer-songwriter in me definitely wants to find different ways to use words—like how Laurie Anderson uses text, or how Björk can turn a couplet around four times and have it mean something different every time. Then there’s the music conservatory nerd. I have perfect pitch, so everything, to me, has a pitch. The car honk, the fork against glass, that’s a D. Or the radiator in A flat. When I’m microwaving something, I harmonize with that. The beautiful thing about sound is that when you elongate anything, there is tonal information. That’s really the gateway between sound and music. Once you’ve got it, you can harmonize with any sound’s tonal center, or make different chords around it.

That’s really how a lot of my object work started. I’d be cooking in the kitchen, or putting out the recycling, and be like, “Oh, that’s a really cool sound!” I’d keep things because of their interesting sounds, texture, oddity. I became enamored of associations, or triggers. Why does this sound take me back to my childhood? This sound is a dream space, or a distant memory. And the sound makers are visual objects themselves. The gestural language starts to build on working with these.

In performance, I’m pretty adamant about the fact that the audience should see how all the sounds are made. It does mean that I carry around the kitchen sink, but I think it’s important that we have that tactile and visual connection. And I’m a pack rat. The cellphone I use—it’s amazing what that old-school Samsung 2G cellphone has done for my life and career. It was a phone with a broken screen—I’d dropped it—but it had a really nice melodic tone to it that reminded me of my Casio in the ’80s. So when I put that through a loop pedal, soundscapes developed.

As a choral singer, I’ve always gravitated towards interesting acoustical structures, for their resonance and their history. When you work in the recording studio, you are given a great artistic freedom to curate how to re-create the sense of space/place by layering tracks, playing with the proximity of the mic and creating jarring combinations of near/far, tactile/ambient. You’re creating sonic surrealism for the ear and mind. I think of music as a spatial environment. Essentially, colored wind. A type of weather that fills the room. I work with different textures and hues at different times of day or night. I work with unusual architecture and interesting historical spaces, because they offer a unique acoustic, and a context of memory to tap into. When I walk into a space, I try to activate its history, evoke its memory, think, “What does this room want to say? What instruments can I use from different eras to give this room voice?” Superimposing music’s invisibility on architecture’s visibility can create a compound sense of time and place for the listener.

What you do on stage has its own internal logic, yet, with all the props and sounds, it also seems completely random. Is what you’re doing improvised or composed?

Composition is really just captured improvisation. But I do like to leave a little bit of margin in live performance—about 20%—for things to happen or to be reactive to the energy in the room. The room might be wanting a slower tempo than you’d planned. Each version has to fit the moment. A friend told me an awesome quote I carry with me: “It don’t matter what song you sing, as long as you sing the song that’s in the room.” I always take that to heart before I go on stage. I try to create an atmosphere that is resonant with people. I think the preposition is very important. Are you performing at people? Are you performing to people? Performing with people? For people? Alongside people? That’s the difference between whether it’s something they’ll really remember.

Do you have a notation system?

I do. They’re like little pictographs for me. It’s like an index card that shows me how I build the layers: viola loop, then vox, then megaphone, then cellphone, then glockenspiel. I know the order they come in. You start with a tone or rhythm, and then you build the other structures around it. Then you build it out; then you start putting drapes on it and you start putting birds in the sky. It really is like sonic drawing.

Record player, bowl, egg. A still from the workshop performance of Sunken Cathedral. Directed by Glynis Rigsby. Photo: Ash Hsie

Do you actively seek objects to make sound with? Or do you think, “I want a sound that’s going to express a certain kind of emotion,” and start looking for things to create that?

It works both ways. A lot of times I’ll come across a sound-making object and be fascinated by it. But sometimes it does work the opposite way. Either way, I know it’s important if it feels like a thread that you have to pull. You don’t really know what you’re pulling, or why your gut knows to, but the more you pull it, the more crazy stuff emerges. Your subconscious figures out some really weird and deep things along the way, too. Eventually your mind can zoom out and see what’s been building. For example, I realized a song that took a year-and-a-half to make was actually an enormous eulogy for my dad. This song, “In Paradisum,” is a medieval chant that is used ceremoniously, when the body is taken out of the church. It’s the transition chant between one life and the next. I’d woven that chant in with a storm of sounds I’d gathered from elsewhere. Then much later realized, “Wow, this is me actually dealing with my father’s death, 22 years later.” It was a way of “letting” that moment transmute. I had never talked about it my whole life. It’s weird how your creative mind and your subconscious self are always working, at very different paces and tempos. Sometimes you don’t even know what’s working in the background. That’s what’s remarkable about the creative process, and also what’s scary as hell about it.

The blood-red vinyl disc from the limited-edition collector’s double LP. Designed by Popular Noise. Photo: INNOVA Recordings

Sunken Cathedral also takes shape as a vinyl double album. Tell us a bit about that.

The LPs were designed and made as limited-edition fine-art pieces. The first record is a blood-red disc with an Ouroboros image of a snake biting its tail. When it spins, it continually swallows its tail. The black disc features stars, so when it spins it looks like a small spinning universe. The LP is very much symbolic of its tangible form. When you drop the needle on the blood-red record, the metaphor is that you’re amplifying what your blood might be saying. And the black record with the celestial stars holds the idea that we are recombinant matter. Old phonograph players used to be diamond-tipped, or sapphire-tipped in order to play records. I found out that when you die, you cannot just be cremated, your ashes can actually be compressed at such a high heat and pressure, you can be turned into a diamond. The LP edition has been designed to illuminate the mortal versus the timeless and universal planes—the recombinant matter and energy that we embody and continually circulate. The entire record plays with metaphors of cycles and circles, the rings on a tree or record. How you live through your life’s journey by way of valences.

I’m very excited about the last track on the record, “Doppler Dreams,” which I made in 2006 for a site-specific dance piece in the McCarren Park Pool, a 55,000-square-foot abandoned pool in Brooklyn. I composed a kinetic choral piece for seven sopranos on bicycles that rode around in different proximities, singing. The audience sat at the perimeter. Wherever you were sitting, you’d have a totally different sound composition than someone across the way, due to your own spatial organization. As the record spins to a close, it swoops in the same gesture: a small ring, and ring, and ring. That, to me, means I can die happy.

Above: Watch “Doppler Dreams”, a live site-specific kinetic choral work for 7 sopranos on bicycles in the 55,000-square-foot McCarren Pool.

Would you prefer people get the record rather than the CD and listen to it from beginning to end? Or should people dip in and out on various media?

Every iteration is medium-specific. The CD order is completely different than the LP order. The CD is made with the idea that people are going to listen to it on the train and in their office. It’s more palatable, not as heavy. Meanwhile, with the LP, just being present with a record governs a different listening experience. I thought about the fact that people would have to turn it over, and their expectations. What will be the first sound you hear when you drop the needle? You might hear wind. Or you might hear record crackles themselves.

On the first side, the first sound is actually a microcassette recording of my father in 1991. It is the only audio I have of him. I remember always knowing that I had that tape recorder somewhere. I tracked it down, and we put it right in at the top. This beat happens, these dogs bark, and then there’s the sound of a pencil scrawling on Bible pages. And then there’s the sample of my father saying, “Hey, do you have a piece of paper?” And my 10-year-old self saying, “Hmm?” “A piece of paper, I need to write something down.” And then you can hear the pencil. It’s like he framed it up himself — all these sounds now make sense, because of that sample.

This is what I mean when I say that sometimes the songs form themselves. I feel like I am just a person that weaves them together. My theater director Glynis Rigsby articulated it for me: “Bora, what you’re doing is like in film. You call it a compound image. If you have a shot that has a radio, an orange, and a glass of water, you’ll start to make connections. You start to come up with a story, you start making associations around what these things are. You do that with sound, and gesture.” The space between sounds is where the interesting tension, or the story, really is.

Above, watch “g i f t”, a site-specific symphonic commission with Sympho for the military drill hall at the Park Avenue Armory, NYC. Directed by Paul Haas

In your TED2014 Fellows talk, you talked about linking music as architecture with a sense of inner space.

This record gathers a lot of the site-specific pieces that I’ve made—whether in the McCarren Park Pool, in the Armory, or at the Ann Hamilton Tower. These were all different spaces. But its beauty lies in the telescoping of that architectural lens inward into the body as well. Architecture is often an amplification of the spaces we carry within us.

Cathedral architecture was really how the album was inspired, because cathedrals are modeled after the body. The arches are the ribcage, and the swells of the organ are its lungs. I started to connect this idea with ancient Chinese medicine, which correlates the various chambers of your body with holding different emotions. I wanted to ask, “How can we use that lens to telescope inward to explore elemental architecture within us? Our blood identity and cultural identity? What are the layers that make up who we are physically, psychologically, and how can I use that as a rubric to illuminate different musical spaces, or emotional spaces — even our relationship to how we navigate actual and external spaces?”

I’ve always just been pretty set on creating my own niche instead of finding one. My music lives very intentionally in the realm between existing forms, and as a result, my fans are a pretty disparate bunch. But I think it’s representative of my disparate musical and cultural identity. There are a lot of new music people, classical people, electronic folks, DJs, producers, robotics people, Korean people, arts people, fine-art people, early music people. Church people, who understand the spirituality of music.

If anything, I would be really excited to know that there could be a bridge between all these genres. I hope that this record can be that weird bridge that allows people to go to these other genres. That would be a huge honor. I think when you leave the definition wide open, people can find their own experience in it. That’s what makes me happy as an artist. I won’t tell people how they should feel in the musical space. I want to simply create the space, have people enter it, find their own experience in it and maybe walk away with something profound and significant for themselves — but that’s not something to be dictated. It has to be unique for each individual. That’s the true test of whether the personal has become universal.

Devonté Hynes is a producer, singer, composer, author, and more. He’s spent a lot of his career helping other musicians produce their work, or writing for others. But he also has an amazing solo career as Blood Orange. At TED, he plays the piano and explains how he sees music. And he really sees music — he’s a synesthete. He says, “Every sound I associate with a color, and every color I associate with a sound.” He sees music as colorful streamers ricocheting across the room.

The music is slow, haunting, and beautiful as Hynes describes how he begins a piece by imagining characters, and then trying to create spaces for them, to build a house. And once he’s build the house, he starts to decorate it, changing the texture by experimenting. Finally he has the house built for the characters he initially imagined. “It’s a real fun experience for me. More than releasing music or even having people hear it. It’s a real selfish thing to just look at this picture I’ve created, that I already had in my mind before.”

In the middle of a tense morning session – you know, just waiting for NSA deputy director Rick Ledgett to come online, ain’t no thing — illustrator Maira Kalman comes up to tell a lovely family tale about music and pants.

In 1932 when Kalman’s family left their village in Belarus (“you can say they fled … the lovely shack, the delightful pogrom”), they took a ship bound for Palestine, now Israel. Tel Aviv was “flooded with Zionists and tangos and cafes and bookstores and the Mediterranean,” says Kalman. It was a difficult but wonderful life.

At the same time, violinist Bronislaw Huberman realized that Jews needed to get out of the USSR, so he invited hundreds of musicians to come to Tel Aviv to form the Palestine Orchestra. For the opening performance, Huberman invited the celebrated Italian conductor Arturo Toscanini to lead. It was December 1936, and “an epic event in this turbulent time.” That night, Kalman points out, Toscanini was dressed to the nines.

In 1954 Kalman’s family moved to a very different Jewish neighborhood – Riverdale, New York. And amazingly: Toscanini moved too, to an enormous estate nearby. As Kalman grew up amidst shrimp cocktail, Coca-Cola and piano lessons, Toscanini was ever-present in his estate on Wave Hill.

In 2011 Kalman learned that his grandson, Walfredo Toscanini, had died, and the entire estate was being sold – including the pants Toscanini wore the night the Palestine Orchestra opened. Kalman rushed to the auction. The bidding was fierce, but at last: she owned a piece of the man who made music for her family and so many others in Tel Aviv. Reader, she got the pants.

Armed with an accordion and wearing a fetching chocolate brown pork pie hat, musician Jason Webley is here. Or as he puts it, an “unknown hairy guy who plays the accordion” is here. Having navigated some technical difficulties, Webley brings the audience firmly on side with his self-deprecating humor and folksy blend of charming cod philosophy. With one song both named in honor of the title of the session and calling for audience interactivity, it’s quite something to behold the assembled crowd throwing up their hands to the roof to yell, “Why?” Credit to them, they did it with gusto.

]]>http://blog.ted.com/no-really-why-jason-webley-at-ted2014/feed/2TED2014_DD_DSC_5838helenwaltersJason Webley. Photo: James Duncan DavidsonWe’re all in the same boat: Sting at TED2014http://blog.ted.com/were-all-in-the-same-boat-sting-at-ted2014/
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Sting. Photo: James Duncan Davidson

Here’s a moment that a certain formerly absurdly hormonal teenage girl had been looking forward to for some time. As had many others in the audience, to judge from the rapturous applause that greets Sting as he takes the TED stage. He plays some songs from his upcoming Broadway musical, The Last Ship.

It’s the story of his own upbringing, raised in the shadow of a shipyard in northeast England. In fact, Sting escaped from there as quickly as he possibly could, but he describes being roiled by writer’s block and forced to fall back on writing what he knew. “It’s ironic that the landscape I worked so hard to escape from, the community I more or less abandoned, is where I had to return to to find my missing muse,” he said. “As soon as I decided to honor the community I came from to tell their story, the songs started to come thick and fast.” The process reminded him that whether you’re a rockstar or a ship-builder, a tribesman in the Amazon or a member of the royal family, we’re all essentially the same. We’re all in the same boat.

With an encore of “Message in a Bottle,” which prompted some delightfully tuneful singing from most of the TED audience, that was the end of the first full day at TED.

]]>http://blog.ted.com/were-all-in-the-same-boat-sting-at-ted2014/feed/5TED2014_RL_DSC_4240_1920helenwaltersTED2014_RL_DSC_4240_1920Well La Di Da (Di): Mark Ronson at TED2014http://blog.ted.com/well-la-di-da-di-mark-ronson-at-ted2014/
http://blog.ted.com/well-la-di-da-di-mark-ronson-at-ted2014/#commentsTue, 18 Mar 2014 00:05:55 +0000http://blog.ted.com/?p=87194[…]]]>At the end of Session 1: Liftoff! at TED2014, DJ and producer Mark Ronson drops the TED Talk intro into a million tiny little pieces. Hair slicked to one side, Ronson mutters self-disparagingly about following Nicholas Negroponte, Chris Hadfield and Ziauddin Yousafzai: “Now I know what it feels like to follow Led Zeppelin, the Stones and the Beatles at a concert.”

To get ready to give his performance, Ronson says, he binged on talks. The visceral passion of the speakers stirred something in him — not unlike the way he felt as a 9-year-old listening to Duran Duran playing “Wild Boys.” Watching the speakers, he felt the same urge he did as a kid about Duran Duran, to “bully our existences into a shared event, to hear something I love in a piece of media and co-opt it, insert myself in that narrative, alter it even.”

The invention of the digital sampler in the ’80s made it possible for Ronson — and so many others — to share with artists he’s admired. (It also meant Ronson didn’t have to make a career from his Duran Duran cover band.) Sampling isn’t about laziness or just straight borrowing, says Ronson: “You can’t just hijack nostalgia wholesale; you have to take an element of it and bring something new.” He gives Doug E. Fresh and Slick Rick’s 1985 “La Di Da Di,” the fifth most-sampled song of all time (at 547 known samples), as an example. He traces its sampling history up through Snoop Dogg, the Notorious B.I.G. and to Miley Cyrus today. Cyrus, who wasn’t even born when “La Di Da Di” was recorded, is bringing the song to a whole new generation.

To the “rockists” — people racist only about rock — who criticize rap, Ronson is emphatic that sampling is valid and here to stay: “The dam has burst; we live in a post-sampling era. When we add something really original then we have a chance to be a part of the evolution of the music we love.”

It’s time for TED! And first on our *brand-new stage* in Vancouver is the iridescent Kevin Olusola from Pentatonix, who starts the show off in a typically mind-shifting way, playing cello and, well, beatboxing. In honor of the fact that this is, after all, the 30th year of the conference, he takes us on a whistlestop tour through some hits from 1984. Feet start a-tapping to Billy Joel, Stevie Wonder and Lionel Richie … and we’re off.

As a 5-year-old kid, I barely knew what the word rhythm meant. At least no one told me what banging on inanimate objects and creating my own little beats might be called. It was like rhythm chose me and I really had no say in the matter. My favorite elementary school pastime was tabletop drum battles with my friends. I’d play on the table using every part of my hand to get a sound: the base of my palm for low sounds, the middle of my hand for a higher-pitched sounds and then my fingers for fast rolls and pop sounds.

At home, inanimate objects seemed to come alive with the rhythmic time. Oatmeal boxes were my favorite. My parents always thought I just loved oatmeal for breakfast—but I knew that the sooner I emptied the box, the sooner I’d have a cardboard drum.

In regards to a real instrument, I really did not know what I was missing until I was given a pair of bongos as a gift at 6 years old. Wow, it was like a whole new world opened up. I was now playing on the soft animal skin that draped the frame of this wonderful percussion instrument. The sounds resonated like echoes in a canyon and I was on a wonderful journey of rhythm and sound.

Several years later, while walking back to my house from a friendly neighborhood game of padless tackle football, I noticed that there were a bunch of things strewn about on my neighbor’s lawn. As I got closer I realized that those things were six different drums—metal poles, pedals and large metal disks, which I later learned were cymbals—all lying on the lawn waiting to be loaded in for what I now know was a band rehearsal. I asked myself, “How does that guy know how to put those things together. How do you actually play all those drums? I was mesmerized. It seemed impossible.

Unbeknownst to me, my mom and dad would give my first drum set at age 11 and my first drum lesson at age 12. I have been in love with rhythm and the drum set ever since then.

Clayton Cameron is a drummer who is perhaps best known for his brush technique. He got his first big break as the drummer for Sammy Davis Jr.’s big band. He then began a longtime collaboration with Tony Bennett, recording 15 albums with him and touring with him for the same number of years. In 2012, Cameron released his debut album, Here’s to the Messengers: Tribute to Art Blakey. Read more about Clayton Cameron on his website. And watch his talk, embedded above. It gives a (snare drum) crash course in the math behind rhythm.

]]>http://blog.ted.com/how-i-fell-in-love-with-the-drums/feed/911092085134_5f277c53e9_btedblogguestBiohacker meets Willy Wonka: Lucy McRae on the making of the incredible edible music video for Architecture in Helsinkihttp://blog.ted.com/lucy-mcrae-on-the-making-of-the-music-video-for-architecture-in-helsinki/
http://blog.ted.com/lucy-mcrae-on-the-making-of-the-music-video-for-architecture-in-helsinki/#commentsFri, 14 Feb 2014 21:00:13 +0000http://blog.ted.com/?p=86366[…]]]>

TED Fellow Lucy McRae (watch her TED Talk) is a body architect — an artist who explores how technology and the body may someday meet and merge. Her latest project is a fantastical and frothy music video for “Dream a Little Crazy” by Australian band Architecture in Helsinki. Watch the mouth-watering video above, and then read all about how McRae and her collaborators wove futuristic ideas about synthetic biology, food-as-sculpture and 3D printing technology into a mad lab full of flying gloop and powder.

How do you describe to people what you do?

I do speculative story-telling. I create parallel, alternate worlds — underpinned by science fiction. The idea is to render possibilities to how technology will change, thinking about how people will embody the future in technology. But I do it in playful ways. In a way, I’m designing the connective tissue between science and imagination. I’m not a technologist, I’m not a scientist. I’m an artist inspired by scientific thinking, and I use that to steer the narratives of my films and concepts.

How did you come to collaborate on the video with Architecture in Helsinki?

A lot of my projects begin with serendipitous encounters, and this project was no different. I got an email from the band at a completely random time when I was at the LimeWharf, a cultural innovation hub in London where I’m now doing a residency. I’d been a Architecture in Helsinki fan for years, while the band’s lead singer, Cameron Bird, had seen my work, but had no idea who was making it. Then he investigated and saw that I was Australian, too, and was like, “Huh? Why haven’t we ever contacted her before?”

So he wrote to me and said I’d love for you to interpret the song. They had no brief, except that they wanted a surreal, infectious, absurd clip, and to have a strong synergy between the album artwork, made by this Finnish illustrator Santtu Mustonen, who hand-crafts analog, globby, dripping illustrations over sharp 3D geometries.

How did this lead to the concept of the biological bakery?

Our concept was to explore how synthetic biology might enter the home, but in a humorous way — using music as a superhighway to illustrate quite a complex idea. My collaborator Rachel Wingfield and I were interested in synthetic biology and the way food is industrially mass-produced, the way balloons or candies are made. We looked at how we could merge these industrial machines with the representation of the body. We started experimenting with the concept of printing the band’s faces with multicolored bacterial strands — using different-colored edible liquids composed of flour and water to symbolize this.

Everything in the film was edible. The band were scanned in Australia with a medical-grade 3D scanner, all the files were sent over to us in London, 3D printed and made into miniature versions in pop-confectionery.

There’s a scene where Cameron’s face-planting the band’s faces into corn flour. This is the way that candies are molded in factories: they create huge, big trays of corn flour, and they emboss, for example, Haribo shapes into the corn flour, and then the liquid is poured in. We piggybacked some of these confectionary techniques and made them for an installation gallery setting.

Two days after the music video, we re-created and built the whole set for a live event. We invited the audience to enter into this world, and we performed the scenes from the music video, exploding the liquid and painting this sort of fantastical tattoo skin over the body. In the end we were merging film and experiential art into the gallery setting.

Did the audience actually get to eat the props from the film? What were they made of?

Yeah, we worked with a chef at the LimeWharf and used the 3D-printed molds to make edible faces with a Prosecco, pear and thyme jelly. The audience members were eating the band. We made chocolate versions of the band as well. Everyone was asked to wear white, so it was kind of like this Willy Wonka–esque experience. Cameron was playing music, it was sort of like this chamber where this liquid was overflowing and spilling everywhere, and people were eating the props.

Now, back in Australia, the band has collaborated with a confectionery company, so the molds we made are being turned into lollipops, which they’re launching as part of their album release. It’s interesting how the evolution of this project started as a conversation, became a music video, then an experiential installation, and now a real-life biological bakery!

I’m interested in transforming materials, and food is a great material to sculpt. By representing the anatomy through food, it’s a way of experiencing sculpture in a different way. You can touch it — eat the contents of a gallery — breaking down the barrier of just being a viewer.

And you’re ingesting into your anatomy the anatomy that was represented by the food.

Exactly. And this points to the bigger picture of whether, in the future, we actually will clone ourselves, or eat ourselves in order to enhance our senses. So it’s kind of tapping into those different areas of research, but in a playful way.